Our (slightly belated) November lineup goes big, and now goes home. Stay tuned for info on Amnesty Week and readers’ picks!
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Holly Boson: Gaga’s reign as Mother Monster wasn’t cut short by the enervating blare of Born This Way‘s production but by her physical health forcing her to cancel tours. I honestly thought the classic rock and traditional pop had taken her from us. “Disease” is the purest example of a “no, back to the old sound for REAL this time” single in a year with several prominent examples (Eminem’s was a self-loathing, high-concept parody of such singles; Katy’s was a perfect gigaflop that scientists will be modelling for centuries). It’s doing Nine Inch Nails, but it’s surprisingly fresh — not smarmy and arch like with Ashley O, if you remember that — and the Middle Eastern blending of major and minor is how big campy melodrama has queercoded itself in recent years, as in “Padam Padam” and “Unholy.” But obviously the highlight is Gaga’s voice, which stays mostly on the leash for a verse and chorus before transforming in the middle eight to a British-comedian lisp building to a repulsive puke; while most pop singers are good vocalists, you can only be a great vocalist if you do things nobody else would even think are worth doing. The lyrics allude, I guess, to her finally getting back to where she was before the lupus and bringing us with her, but they’re the only thing that sounds outdated here; that lyrical style that seemed sarcastic-deep in the inane lyrical world of late-’00s pop seems a bit plain next to the Taylors and SabCarps. But if you wanted to hear Gaga sing great, profound lyrics, you’d be listening to her version of “That’s Life” on that Joker 2 album, and there’s a reason you’re listening to this instead.
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Harlan Talib Ockey: I too got really into Nine Inch Nails this summer.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Why split time promoting that cursed surprise musical Joker movie, the barely lived Harlequin companion album, and milquetoast Bruno Mars Grammy-bait when this was waiting in the wings the whole time? One has to wonder if it speaks to a lack of faith in her label in putting all their eggs in one basket, to wanting to avoid a crowded 2024 pop release schedule, or to Gaga’s propensity for wanting to be everything to everyone. It’s a shame because “Disease” is classic Gaga—she’s literally written this song before—a chimera of hooks, theatricality, and life-or-death stakes delivered with 110% commitment.
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Leah Isobel: Chromatica might as well have been called The Fame Ruined My Fucking Life And I Hate Myself . One song has the line “You love the ‘Paparazzi,’ love The Fame / Even though you know it causes me pain,” another has the line “The [little] monster inside you is torturing me,” and the album-length narrative is about struggling and possibly failing to relocate the creative spark that animated her early career. Yet so much of its press cycle received it as Gaga Is Back We Love Pop Music. So what is a once era-defining popstar, trapped in the recursive prison of fame in which everyone expects her to remain frozen in time, supposed to do? “Disease” suggests that the answer is to turn her rage outward. The spooky-ooky production recalls some of Gaga’s best songs and adds in a few hilarious, campy shrieks for good measure. But by design, it lacks the vertiginous thrill that defined her old work. The overall feeling is one of constriction, as she builds up more and more energy within a tighter and tighter space. When she sings “You’re so tortured when you sleep / Plagued with all your memories” through gritted teeth, it’s both projection and reformulation, reframing the Chromatica problem as one of audience expectation and nostalgia rather than one of her potential inability to live up to past glories. And I mean, Girl With No Face is my current album of the year, so I’m pretty sympathetic to a diva telling her fans to fuck off. But past that delightful spikiness, there isn’t a lot of substance to grab onto here, with one of her more pedestrian-feeling choruses and a disappointing nothing of a bridge. Even if she livens it up with one of her best vocal performances and a final minute that absolutely pops off, it feels a little Gaga-by-committee, sanding down the abrasive edges to fit everything into yet another return-to-form narrative. Gaga’s career is fueled and defined by contradiction and tension — between men and women, art and pop, the artist and the public. But at a certain point, her conflicting impulses cancel each other out.
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Taylor Alatorre: Rattling around in my brain for the past decade and change has been that 2011 Slate article about Lady Gaga embodying a kind of musical conservatism. To which I say, in a louder and more assured tone than I did back then: yeah, so? Whatever issues one might take with her pretenses to radicalism or her drama club appeal, the recycling of old forms did not begin or end with Gaga, and in fact is a healthier impulse in pop than the remorseless demands from some corners for constant, album-after-album reinvention. The fog of Top 40’s maximalist era having cleared, we can now see that her cobbling together of references and postures ended up birthing a distinct and novel persona that can now be used as a reference point by others — even by the artist herself, Gaga doing Gaga. I wish that “Disease” had set its sights higher than mere memory activation; the “playing it safe” aspect of her hidden conservatism is much in evidence here. But she’s working from a strong template, and even if it’s a distillation of her stronger stuff, she still sings it like it’s top-shelf material, like it’s all new to her even if it isn’t to us.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Born This Way is among the most sonically and emotionally urgent pop albums of the 2010s; but while in 2011 it was inescapable, in 2024 it is underrated. Pitchfork’s 10-year retrospective is an exception, one of the few pieces of writing that truly understands it: “[Gaga] sings like she’s making a blood pact…. she often sounds like she has gazed into the depths of hell and is back to tell the tale.” I suspect that’s because because Born This Way is only half a great album, and the title track is not in that half. The album was also accompanied by tabloidy extramusical sidequests — anyone remember Jo Calderone? Lüc Carl? — that, in retrospect, might have pulled the album away from canon via their black hole of forgettability. But I will defend the throbbing electro triptych of “Heavy Metal Lover,” “Government Hooker,” and “Bloody Mary” with my life. And history has vindicated that — the kids made “Bloody Mary” a TikTok trend, and that album track now has more Spotify streams than actual singles “The Edge of Glory” and “You and I” combined. The public wants this — more, at least, than they want renditions of “When the Saints Come Marching In.” Maybe Gaga understands that, too; Chromatica revisited Born This Way‘s trauma, and here she revisits its sound. “Disease” does not match the aforementioned holy trinity, but it does match the unholy (non-pejorative) “Judas.” She does for Munchausen’s-by-proxy what she did for the OG betrayer — namely, way too fucking much. I’m not convinced this single is objectively good — it shares the blackpilled edgelord vibe of Suicide Squad (clearly she chose the wrong DC film), the fuck-it-zero-filter vibe of Camila Cabello’s “I LUV IT,” and the intangible vibe of Amy Lee’s “Push the Button.” But subjectively, to me? It’s exactly what I want Lady Gaga’s music to be. And she’s still a better singer than most pop artists working now.
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TA Inskeep: What I want from Gaga is precisely a weirdo return to her The Fame Monster / Born This Way-era robotic pop, complete with a video that plays like it was made by art-damaged art students. Gaga at her musical best is the pop diva as freak-a-zoid, and she nails that here.
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Nortey Dowuona: AND THEY REMEMBERED TO LAYER SNARES! The ad-libs are clumsily added and often drowned by the bass synths and lead vocal, feeling both vestigial and flimsy. The mix falls flat, especially during the supposedly open, airy final chorus — the backgrounds are so pushed to the back that they can’t take hold once the bass comes in to steamroller them, and they flail during the outro like the wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man. BUT THEY REMEMBERED TO LAYER SNARES!!
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Alfred Soto: The arena-level overstatement feels like watching clips of a Olympics game from 1984, but in times like these it’s cheering to listen to Gaga wail at the plants, cars, incels, influencers, and MAGA voters, many of whom like her music too. Despite naff lyrics, “Disease” echoes the sturdiest Born This Way tracks without serving as a reprise.
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Mark Sinker: “If you were a sinner I could make you believe”: this is a curious line. Self-identified sinners already believe, that’s the point! And there’s a reason Clive Barker seems dated where Hitchcock doesn’t. For the latter the reversal — evil be thou my good — is a genuine temptation and not just a semiotic play of surfaces; it’s desire whispering crisscross at someone who needs out of a hated bind, because don’t they deserve to be? Except the way out is actually a way deeper in: for believers there’s something real at stake. The threat is so much stickier. I don’t hate Gaga’s pop-plasticky moral cosmology, where the night-people are mostly secretly nice people in goblin masks. Sometimes it’s fun! Sometimes it has a solid hooky melody, and sometimes her singing hops up a level, beyond its routine storytelling mode. But the dark is also real.
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Jel Bugle: Guy on the Radio 1 chart show just called it experimental — maybe in the sense of a high school science class. It’s a bit don’t bore us, get to the chorus. Good that Lady Gaga is doing the pop music thing again, but I feel that in some ways her mystique has been broken by her film stardom, and she has gone beyond popstardom. She’ll never be able to recapture former glories.
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Al Varela: I’m not convinced that Lady Gaga still enjoys making pop music. Like “Stupid Love” before it, “Disease” has all the ingredients of a classic Gaga song, but the cooking method is all wrong. The production blasts so loudly in the mix in a way that technically envokes the bombast of the Born This Way era, but with none of the rigid tightness that kept that album’s best moments from going off the edge. Gaga’s snarling and yelling are impressive, but they don’t cut through the unbearable noise. Honestly, this is just as hollow of an imitation of former glory as “Woman’s World.”
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Jackie Powell: The response to “Disease” speaks to the high standard that Gaga is held to. Stans and music writers reveled in its dark pulsating beats, feral screams, catchy anaphora in the pre-chorus (the ah-ahs) and the bombastic chorus that showcases Mother Monster’s vocal breadth, but some also realized that “Disease” was a track born out of fanservice. DJ Louie XIV of the Pop Pantheon Podcast recognized this immediately, especially given how “Bloody Mary” revived her fan base by accident after its success on TikTok. Rather than reinvent herself, Gaga went for what had worked during her peak — much as her peer Katy Perry did earlier this year, though “Disease” is a much better song than “Woman’s World.” The story it tells is simple but is in direct response and in opposition to Chromatica. Four years ago, Gaga’s messaging was about escaping darkness when it rages inside. “Disease” shows a willingness to accept it, and there’s an earnestness to the theatrics Gaga delivers in her vocal performance and the music video. Despite the single’s struggles to hit mainstream airways and prove that Gaga can still manufacture a hit without a collaborator, what’s refreshing about “Disease” is how it symbolizes autonomy. Sure, it sounds like nothing that’s currently on the radio and as a result hasn’t had the success of “Die With a Smile,” a song I absolutely rated too high in September. But lead singles mean a lot less in 2024 than they did 10 years ago. Let’s not call this new era over before it’s even truly started.
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Will Adams: Gaga’s always going to be Doing A Lot. When that manifests as bombastic renditions of jazz standards or doing press junkets that suggest the process of acting is the emotional equivalent of medieval torture, it’s exhausting. But when it manifests as the gargantuan electro of Born This Way (though what “Disease” sounds most like to me is Rezz) and larger-than-life vocals, it rules.
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Monday, November 11th, 2024 10:43 pm